Stalker, VII | Paco Díaz

In November 2015, the artist exhibited at the Colegio de España in Paris, a date that coincides with the attacks in the city. He himself states that upon entering the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the atmosphere reminded him of the film. According to him, “The leaden sky of Paris was reminiscent of the film's, as was the cold luminosity and humidity. The living part of the cemetery, with its twisted trees, plants growing among tombs and moss covering them, revealed its domestication. Vegetation that engulfs what man has made, oxidizing, cracking, and crumbling. As in Stalker.” The day after his visit to Père-Lachaise, he discovered the Montparnasse cemetery. And he dedicated himself to obsessively photographing the ceramic flowers, which he now presents through photographs intended to endure, printed with mineral inks on handmade cotton paper, which in the end time will consume; or not. These ceramic flowers on tombstones, neither smell nor die, aspire to be eternal like what lies beneath them. In this series, he uses the tools of one of the most traversed genres in art history, the vanitas: generally, a collection of objects that at first glance seem chosen and arranged casually and whose mission is no more than seduction and demonstration of the artist's skill. Although in a more detailed reading, the trained eye can decode symbols and messages. According to Díaz, “these are ceramic flowers resistant to freezing rain, to the August heat and the March winds. Artificial flowers with their bright colors that seem to float on the gray stone tombstones. A trick that has an expiration date. Time always wins, it wears away the hard ceramic and ends up breaking it. Moss, fungi, and lichens appear among the false petals. The ordinary, humble plants and small organisms emerge from the extraordinary and end up taking over the false flowers.” Here, the landscape becomes a still life, enhancing a chiaroscuro of baroque origin. The detail to discover is nature making its way through the artificial.